Muammar Qaddafi’s crush on Condoleezza Rice is one of the strangest things about him that is not a part of his face. When Libyans raided Qaddafi’s Bab al Azizia palace, they discovered a homemade scrapbook filled with photos of the former U.S. secretary of state. “Yes, Leezza, Leezza, Leezza... I love her very much,” he told Al Jazeera in 2007, like some sort of despotic Nabokov.

Now we get to hear the other side of the greatest love story of this blog post. Tina Brown’s digital concern, the Daily Beast, published an excerpt from Rice’s forthcoming memoir, No Higher Honor, in which Rice reveals that Qaddafi “had a slightly eerie fascination with me personally, asking visitors why his ‘African princess’ wouldn’t visit him.” And it gets worse, by which we mean better:

“It was Ramadan at the time of my visit, and after sundown the ‘Brother Leader‘ insisted that I join him for dinner in his private kitchen. ... At the end of dinner, Qaddafi told me that he’d made a videotape for me. Uh oh, I thought, what is this going to be? It was a quite innocent collection of photos of me with world leaders—President Bush, Vladimir Putin, Hu Jintao, and so on—set to the music of a song called ‘Black Flower in the White House,’ written for me by a Libyan composer. It was weird, but at least it wasn’t raunchy.”

What she doesn’t know is that “black flower” is an Arabic colloquialism meaning “foreign leader about whom I have sexy dreams, and I mean that in the most grotesque way possible, no, even grosser than that, take it one step further, and right, there it is.”